Social capital has proven to be a useful concept, but has been ill-defined and not well-measured in the economics literature. We propose a different empirical method for measuring social capital, latent class analysis, based on the idea that social capital is an unobservable multidimensional...

Item response theory (IRT) has recently been proposed as a framework to measure deprivation. It allows a latent measure of deprivation to be derived from a set of dichotomous items indicating deprivation, and the determinants of deprivation to be analysed. We investigate further the use of IRT...

Small business failure has been the subject of considerable research effort (Beaver, 1966: Berryman, 1983: Holmes, 1988: Bickerdyke, 2000). Peel and Wilson (1996) found that there was a substantial amount of both theoretical and empirical small business research relating to credit management and...